September 26, 2012

The patent, #8,275,590, relates to the simulation of trying on one or more virtual-wearable items within a video feed, using gestural controls to navigate through the interfaces, and taking pictures to share with your friends,… read more

September 26, 2012

DARPA has made progress in developing less expensive fabrication methods for inertial sensors and is making them orders of magnitude smaller and less expensive than the large, expensive gyroscopes used today.

Military missions of all types need extremely accurate navigation techniques to keep people and equipment on target. The Military relies on GPS or, when GPS is unavailable, precise sensors for navigation.

September 26, 2012

If you throw a ball underwater, you’ll find that the smaller it is, the faster it moves: A larger cross-section greatly increases the water’s resistance. The researchers plan to use this basic principle, on a microscopic scale, to carry out biomedical tests that could eventually lead to fast, compact and versatile medical-testing devices.

During the past decade, DNA sequencing costs have fallen dramatically (see www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts), fueled by tools, technologies and process improvements developed by genomics researchers. In 2004, NHGRI… read more

September 27, 2012

Researchers at King’s College London, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a key factor responsible for declining muscle repair during aging, and discovered how to halt the process in mice with a common drug.

The finding provides clues as to how muscles lose mass with age, which can result in weakness that affects mobility and may cause falls.

September 27, 2012

A small Indian village is perhaps the last place you would expect to see the future of manufacturing, but in the Maharashtra region, there are plans to create one of the hottest pieces of technology around, BBC Future reports.

“Learning while doing” is the philosophy behind an educational project in Pabal called the Vigyan Ashram — part of a worldwide project called FabLab, set up… read more

September 27, 2012

Computer scientists Computer scientists Lior Shamir and Jane Tarakhovsky of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan have developed a program that analyzes paintings in a manner similar to how expert art historians perform their analysis, and conducted an experiment that showed that machines can outperform untrained humans in the analysis of fine art.

In the experiment, the researchers used approximately 1, 000 paintings of 34 well-known artists, and let the computer… read more

September 27, 2012

Google’s venture fund is planning to invest $1 billion in a wide-range of start-ups over the next five years and seeks entrepreneurs that “have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” with forward-thinking ideas, especially in biotech,William Maris, says Google Ventures managing partner.

Maris said some of the areas he is interested in include businesses that are focused on radical life extension, cryogenics, and nanotechnology, CNBC reports.

September 28, 2012

By harnessing a specialized optical fiber sensor, a new “smart” surgical tool can compensate for a surgeon’s imperceptible hand tremor by making hundreds of precise position corrections each second — fast enough to keep the surgeon’s hand on target.

Even the most skilled and steady surgeons experience minute, almost imperceptible hand tremors when performing delicate tasks. Normally, these tiny motions are inconsequential, but for doctors specializing in fine-scale… read more

A new class of tiny electronic devices capable of dissolving completely in water or bodily fluids

September 28, 2012

A new type of biodegradable electronics technology that could revolutionize medical implants, environmental monitors, and consumer devices has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois, in collaboration with Tufts University and Northwestern University.

“We refer to this type of technology as transient electronics,” said John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder Professor of Engineering at the U. of I., who led the multidisciplinary research team.… read more

September 28, 2012

Using the innocuous M13 bacterial virus, bioengineers at Stanford have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell — which they term the “biological Internet,” or “Bi-Fi.”

The system greatly increases the complexity and amount of data that can be communicated between cells and could lead to greater control of biological functions within cell communities.